Democratizing Soap
Awais Hameed Khan, Ben Matthews · 2019
This paper explores methodological considerations of using constructive assemblies as a participatory design tool in order to explore new conceptual and material possibilities in saturated product categories. Constructive assemblies are tangible, reconfigurable, modular physical sets that can be combined in multiple different ways. They are valuable as collaborative tools on account of how they facilitate social inclusion by having a low skill barrier to participation. They are also valuable as generative tools, as users are able to quickly build complex constructions with the constituent components in different configurations. In this paper, we present a study in which a series of eight Participatory Design (PD) workshops were conducted with these assemblies, in which stakeholders explored possibilities for re-designing the everyday use of soap. Participants were drawn from the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry and everyday soap users, and the workshops took three different configurations: video-conference and shared location, video conference and distributed location, and physical workshop and shared location. Our analysis highlights the consequentiality of the materiality of the assembly, the interplay between the specific workshop tasks, their setup and the physical constraints of the toolset, and emergent social behaviour from the experiments. We discuss these findings in relation to existing frameworks